19 April 2011

That latest YouGov Holyrood poll...

You will doubtlessly all now have seen the headline results from the Scotland on Sunday YouGov poll on Scottish voting intentions. For those of you who like sinking up to your oxters in the actual data, and attempting a spot of amateur psephology, YouGov have now published the full tables here. While the topline results certainly bear reiteration, I thought it might be interesting and instructive to hop back atop one of my hobby-horses, gender and the SNP, and see what the poll might suggest about the breakdown of support along gendered lines. Does the gender gap persist, or is it closing? What role, if any, do perceptions of the Maximum Eck have in sustaining such a gap? From a sample of 1,135 people taken between the 13th and 15th of April, on the Holyrood constituency ballot, the pollsters found...

Constituency voting intentions (total)

SNP ~ 40%

Labour ~ 37%

Tory ~ 11%

Liberal ~ 8%

Other ~ 4%

Don't know ~ 9%

Before the election campaign, I devoted several posts to the issue of the SNP's gender voting gap. Polls recording thumping Labour leads generally suggested that the Nationalists were not doing terribly well with the female electorate. All change? Did Scotland's female population go lassie go and change their minds? Here is the gendered preferences on the constituency ballots, according to the latest YouGov research:

Constituency voting intentions (men)

SNP ~ 41%

Labour ~ 39%

Tory ~ 10%

Liberal ~ 6%

Other ~ 4%

Don't know ~ 7%

And on the distaff side...

Constituency voting intentions (women)

SNP ~ 39%

Labour ~ 36%

Tory ~ 12%

Liberal ~ 9%

Other ~ 5%

Don't know ~ 10%

On the regional list, voting intentions, adjusted in the same fashion, were as follows:

Regional voting intentions (total)

SNP ~ 35%

Labour ~ 33%

Tory ~ 12%

Liberal ~ 7%

Green ~ 6%

SSP ~ 3%

Solidarity ~ 1%

Don't know ~ 9%

And again, divided along gendered lines:

Regional voting intentions (men)

SNP ~ 36%

Labour ~ 34%

Tory ~ 12%

Green~ 6%

Liberal ~ 6%

SSP ~ 3%

Solidarity ~ 1%

Don't know ~ 7%

And for the lady?

Regional voting intentions (women)

SNP ~ 33%

Labour ~ 33%

Tory ~ 13%

Liberal ~ 9%

Green ~ 6%

SSP ~ 2%

Solidarity ~ 0%

Don't know ~ 11%

There is plenty of other fascinating snippets in the elaborated tables, including how different age groups and wealth groups polled. The socially graded responses warrant a closer examination. The results are curious. YouGov use the NRS social grade scale, briefly explained here. On the numbers adjusted for likelihood to vote, in constituency preferences, Labour continues to lead the SNP amongst the "middle class" contingent of ABC1s, the nationalists polling 34% to Labour's 38%. Amongst working class (C2DE) people polled, YouGov record that the SNP are leading Labour by 7%, at 44% to Labour's 37%. This is even more striking in the regional preferences, which show only 29% of ABC1s reporting that they'll likely vote Nationalist, compared to 40% of C2DEs who say that Salmond and shoal will carry off their ballots. By contrast, Labour attract 32% of ABC1 voters on the regional ballot, compared to 34% of respondents, assessed by YouGov as falling into the C2DE social grade. There was also the question, which of the following do you think would make the better First Minister of Scotland? Given the foregoing, I thought it might be interesting to tease out how different groups responded, including women and men, and the two social gradings of ABC1 and C2DE. Here was how they answered...

"Best First Minister" (totals)

Alex Salmond ~ 52%

Iain Gray ~ 27%

Don't know ~ 21%

"Best First Minister" (Men)

Alex Salmond ~ 56%

Iain Gray ~ 30%

Don't know ~ 14%

"Best First Minister" (women)

Alex Salmond ~ 48%

Iain Gray ~ 27%

Don't know ~ 27%

"Best First Minister" (ABC1 social grades)

Alex Salmond ~ 50%

Iain Gray ~ 26%

Don't know ~ 24%

"Best First Minister" (C2DE social grades)

Alex Salmond ~ 53%

Iain Gray ~ 29%

Don't know ~ 18%

Oh, and for folk with a burning interest in it, the more detailed results of the Scotsman poll on the AV referendum, conducted in the same bout of Scottish fieldwork, can also now be read here...

11 comments
:

So, you're concluding that the labour vote is essentially propped up by an inert overlapping set of upper-level public sector bureaucrats and nervous ladies, who most likely identify themselves subjectively as working class, and whose voting habits are identical whether for Holyrood and Westminster?

Obviously I'd be cautious about reading too much into the poll, particularly since ABC1 & C2DE are crude categories. However, anyone with a taste for irony should be able to enjoy the implications of this, where bourgeois Labour voters (whose lineaments I've sketched elsewhere) vote for the People's party, thereby frustrating the people's preferences.

Braveheart,

I think Nationalists are sanguine about the nature of our electoral support. Achieving the referendum's the thing. The debate which follows is another matter, for the Scottish people to decide.

So they harvest anti-council tax votes with the promise of a LIT. But they don't actually have a workable LIT. So they freeze the council tax, but that means council cuts... but that's the councils fault. Anywy, who cares about daycare centres and throghcare centres and disability buses...

And they promise to match the school building programme "brick for brick", but they oppose PPP and are also harvesting anti-PPP votes. But that's ok, they will replace PPP with SFT. But they don't actually have a workable SFT. So they don't commisssion any new schools, but they open all the schools built by Labour and claim to have "completed" 330 schools when they have no reponsibility for any of these schools and oppose the PPP that built them.

It's a long list, I could go on, but you know all of it already.

As you say "sanguine": i.e. any lie to get votes and who cares about the actual schools and hospitals and doctors and teachers...

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